Frequently asked questions

Simply put – we are your personal chef!

Prairie Box is Winnipeg’s #1 meal prep service designed to serve anybody living an active lifestyle, whether you’re in the gym every day, or a busy professional or a busy parent. We are dedicated to making healthy eating more convenient.

We deliver fresh, never frozen meals each week to your home or office on Sundays or Mondays. By providing great tasting meals and convenience we do all the work for you. No calorie counting, carb-counting, food journals, shopping, cooking, or dirty dishes. So if you really think about it – we’re your personal chef and grocery shopper, recipe creator, and dishwasher. All you have to do is enjoy.

We’re located at 664 King Edward St in Winnipeg, Manitoba R3H 0P2. Stop in and say hi!

We deliver anywhere within Winnipeg, MB. If you’re in a surrounding community, email us at [email protected] and we’ll see what we can come up with!

We offer Keto, Weight Loss, Everyday and 100% vegan Beyond Meat meal plans.

There really is something for everyone!

We are a subscription service.

  • This means that once you sign up, your account will renew every 7 days after your order. You can skip any weeks you won’t need meals, and cancel anytime.

There is a weekly deadline for order preferences.

  • We need to shop and prep your meals fresh for you every week, so we ask that you get your order preferences for the week in by no later than Thursday at 5PM. If you miss the deadline, email us at [email protected]. We’ll try our best to accommodate you!

You can self-manage nearly every aspect of your subscription.

  • Because we know life is busy, we allow you maximum ability to plan and customize your subscription. On a weekly basis, you can also change the number of meals you’ll receive, change the delivery address for a specific order, and also change the day of week on which your meals would be delivered. Great stuff!

You can skip a week to stop receiving meals for a time.

  • If you’re out of town for a week or two, or simply don’t want to receive Prairie Box meals for a period of time (lots of Thanksgiving leftovers?), you can easily skip a week of delivery… or two… or three right from inside your account!

Simply choose which meal plan interests you, and click Get Started. You’ll be prompted to choose your number of meals, and then pick from our diverse menu options!

There are many ways you can manage your subscription through us.

Firstly, you can make changes to your subscriptions default settings, including:

  • how many meals you receive each week
  • where you receive your meals
  • how you pay for your meals

Secondly, you can skip or pause any weeks, if there’s a time when you want to stop receiving meals for a period of time (a nice vacation in Belize, perhaps?)

Thirdly, you can add promotional codes, so that if you notice a discount code online that you want to apply to your next charge, you can add it into our system and see if it is relevant for you situation. Pro Tip: Make sure you sign up to the newsletter and read them each week. You may see them in there!

You can make all of those changes within your account. Simply sign into the account that you’ve created with us and click “Manage Subscriptions”. On that page, you’ll see a drop-down menu with various options. To skip weeks. click “Upcoming Orders”. You’ll see a schedule of your orders, and an option to skip whichever ones you won’t need, with no penalties or obligations. It’s that easy!

If you need a hand skipping orders, email us at [email protected] and we’ll make sure you get set up.

As we do the majority of our planning and ordering on Thursday, any orders placed after 5PM the Thursday beforehand will be carried over until the next week.

When you sign up for Prairie Box, you are charged each week and have food delivered right to your door each week by default. Unless of course you have chosen to skip a week.

You are free to go in to your account and change the number of meals, payment information, pause or skip weeks all in your account management. You can also change which meals you’d like each week, right from within your account!

Our main goal is to get you healthy meals each week so you can crush your goals as seamlessly as possible.

Absolutely!

Many of our customers are multiple subscribers for work, different family members and friends.

To add another subscription just follow the get started link like when you initially set up. Leave the comment in the notes section for who it’s for.

This subscription can also be managed just like your main one.

There is no obligation to order a minimum number of weeks.

At anytime, if you don’t want to receive meals, you can skip or cancel your subscription in the manage subscription section of your account.

If for any reason you didn’t want to receive meals from us, you have a couple of options:

  1. You can skip a specific weekly order in your subscription. This would mean you opt out of receiving a specific order. (You would still receive the orders you haven’t skipped) This is a great tool for sporadic absences from work or home.
  2. You can cancel your subscription in your account management. Don’t worry, you can always reactivate it in the future. This is perfect for someone who wants to take some time off but might want to order again in the future.

The weekly deadline is the Thursday before you receive your meals at 5PM.

The reason we need to set a deadline is that we spend the next few days shopping, prepping and cooking all of your meals! If you get your order in beforehand, we can guarantee the right delivery on Sunday or Monday.

Prairie Box is a subscription service. That means when you sign up we regularly charge your card each week and send you meals.

However, If you would like to receive a single week of meals or at least try us out before recieving them regularly on a weekly basis, you can do that.

All you have to do is:

  1. Place an order through us
  2. Pause or cancel your account right after

You will still receive your upcoming order.

Yes you can!

But…if you do cancel for any reason, it’s important to note that you are not cancelling any order for which you have already been charged for and which is already being processed. Any order that has been processed is already in our system and has already begun our preparation process. (yep, we’re pretty fast!). Please note that there is a weekly deadline for which you need to make any changes to your subscription – including cancelling – before your next charge. We send you weekly emails to remind you of this deadline.

Just note there is an alternative to canceling your subscription:

  • You can skip a specific weekly order under you manage subscription tab when you log in to your account. This means that you would opt out of receiving meals for that given week. It’s a great tool if you know you’ll be out of the house or office and want to make sure you don’t receive meals for a week or two.

We deliver our meals every Sunday, between 11AM and 4PM or on Mondays to your office between 9AM and 12PM. They arrive in an insulated box, so they’re guaranteed to be fresh!

If your package does not show up on your expected delivery date, please contact us immediately the following day! Please note, too, that meals can sometimes be delayed on the delivery date due to weather or traffic, although this is a rarity. We try to get food to you as quickly as possible because we know you can’t wait to eat our fresh meals!

NOTE: If you’d like to receive meals on Monday, email [email protected] once you’ve placed your order. We default to Sunday delivery.

We use our own in-house carriers to deliver your meals. This ensures that your Prairie Box experience is consistent, every step of the way!

We know that you want to enjoy your fresh, delicious meals with as little friction as possible, so we’ve hired our own team to make sure that you have the best ordering and delivering experience possible.

Sometimes, people have special requests like a buzz code, or a request to leave the meals around the back in a cooler if they won’t be home. That’s fine! Simply make note of it in the “Notes” section of the checkout, or you can also email us at [email protected] and we’ll make a note for you.

If there are any special instructions you’d like to convey, you can let us know and we’ll do our best to help!

If you won’t be home on Sunday, our driver will call you and try to get you your meals that day. If not, we will try again the following day. If you know ahead of time that you won’t be home, you can leave a cooler on your front porch. Our drivers are trained to place the meals in the coolers if there’s no answer at the door.

If you’re unable to receive your meals both days, they will be available for pickup at 1549 Grant Ave in Winnipeg.

We accept any major credit card.

In some instances Visa Debit may work if you have it set up correctly with your bank account.

We are a weekly subscription service, so we charge your card initially and each week thereafter. It might take 2 or 3 business days to show up on your card depending on who your carrier is.

Your card will be charged weekly, 7 days after your initial order.

Each delivery costs $7.00

If you can’t be charged for an order – for instance, your credit card expired – we would send you an email when we next try to charge you to let you know the charge was unsuccessful. From that point, you have 3 days to update your credit card information so that, the next time we try to charge you, the charge will go through. We will try to charge you about three more times over that 24-hour period, before canceling the order, so, as long as you resolve the credit card issue by the Thursday deadline mentioned in the email we send, you’ll be golden!

We occasionally advertise special offers for our meals, but we don’t have an official page on our website dedicated to current offers.

Your best bet is to check us out on social media because we love to spread some good deals to our online friends!

You can find us on Facebook and Instagram.

Chances are, if you keep tabs on us, you’ll find a deal come up that we’d be happy to apply for you!

In the checkout, you’ll see a box that says “I have a discount coupon”. Simply put in your discount code, and click “Apply”.

Each Prairie Box meal is designed to fill one adult. We want you to enjoy our meals and to feel full afterwards, so you’re not reaching for snacks a couple of hours later!

We try to use as many local, organic sources as possible. Our number one priority is providing you with the highest-quality ingredients, cooked by our team of professional chefs.

If you’re a farmer or local food purveyor, please drop us a line at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

We change our menu based on feedback. We know you have your favourites, so if you’ve had something on the menu before that you’d like to see again, drop us a line with your feedback at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

We don’t have the ability to change the ingredients of the meals you see on our website because of the huge number of meals we cook ever week for our happy customers! We cook thousands of meals every month and have to plan our schedule in advance to ensure your food arrives fresh to your doorstep. All of our dishes are pretty much set the way they are, so, sadly, we can’t accept special substitution requests.

At this time, we do not have family portions for our meals – only the single meals of 1 serving. If desired, however, you can always order multiple subscriptions under the same account to accommodate more family members and receive more than 12 meals per week (our largest meal plan).

If you’d like a larger order than 12, please drop us a line and we make sure we get you what you need!

Our meals are designed to be refrigerated to preserve their freshness, but we understand that life happens and you are not always able to eat them right away. Therefore, if freezing is necessary, you can indeed freeze the food. If you go the freezing route, please follow the heating instructions provided below.

To heat meals from a frozen state:

  1. Do not defrost.
  2. Microwave for 1 min from frozen state.
  3. Follow original heating instructions provided.

Our meals are designed to be heated in the microwave since they already arrive fully cooked. Make sure that you crack open a corner of the container to let steam escape, and then heat your meal for 2-3 minutes on high. Keep in mind, though, that microwaves can be different from one another, so some may require shorter or longer heating time than others. You know your microwave best, so you may want to try out your first meal assuming an average cooking time (try 2 minutes) and then adding to that time as you see fit.

Our meals are designed to be heated in the microwave, since they already arrive fully cooked. If you don’t have a microwave or would rather not use one, however, you can certainly use an oven or a range! Just be aware that you will have to get a few pots and pans dirty, since you cannot use our containers in an oven or on a range. Please also note that heating in an oven or a pot will require you to watch the item closely to see when it has reached your desired temperature.

Tips:

  • Place the item in an oven-safe dish and cover the top in tin foil. Heat the oven to 325 degrees (300 if you’re using a convection oven).
  • Heat for 8 minutes, stir once, place back in the oven for 2 minutes

Remember, you are not cooking the meal, just heating it – so, once the item is hot it is ready to eat!

As the meals come fresh, we recommend heating and eating within 5 days of receiving them. If you know you won’t be able to get at them in time, the containers freeze beautifully.

We want you to have nothing but the best experience with our meals. If you have any complaints, please let us know within 5 days of receiving your meals and we will make it right. Contact us at [email protected], or call 204.488.9927.

Prairie Box